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Comment by mghackerlady | Hacker News Reader

How many new googlers use vim or emacs do you think? I can imagine at least a small amount of new vim people since vim will always be popular, but I would love to know if more than a handful of new googlers a year use emacs

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I've switched to emacs and I no longer use IDEs. This is because I do all my edits, as a personal policy, via LLM. I mostly use emacs for magit (I work on a git-on-borg repo).

I joined gdm recently, and previously used (neo)vim exclusively. Begrudgingly Cider-V is very, very good. It might be possible to get by without it, but the system is so locked down you’re going to make a lot of sacrifices. (very few authorised extensions, codebase is so large it’s going to break whatever tools your used to using anyway, no git)

I’m well thinking I may as well trade my brick of an m5 pro for a 13” chromebook, it’s a strange time.

> codebase is so large it’s going to break whatever tools your used to using anyway, no git

There is Jujutsu (with Piper backend) officially supported, and that is better than git. But of course, you will not be grepping the source code, there is code search for that.

When I was there all the cool people used mercurial. Git5 was creaky and didn’t work well but hg worked brilliantly. The cool people used hg to do stacked CLs so they were productive even when blocked by code review.

Fun fact: This particular version of hg with its extensions actually originated from Meta.

We can use jj now, thank goodness. But I still miss my old git workflows + lazygit

I’m no longer at Google and I use jj for my git repo at my current workplace. It’s great as it’s similar to hg but slightly more convenient (no need to manually `hg evolve`). It’s also great that it’s a skill that’s transferable to the world outside google3.

have you tried fossil? I really like it for personal projects

For security reasons, the VSCode marketplace is not accessible, but many (in the 3-digit range) external extensions have been imported. One technical limitation is that some extensions are not designed for the web (e.g. try to run local things).

Famously Jeff Dean uses emacs. Emacs integration to internal systems (source code, code search, LSP, build, etc) was super solid when I was there ~2020.

There is an internal website that tracks statistics of tool use, where “tool” is defined liberally and includes emacs. It would be tracked if you just (require 'google) somewhere in your initialization code.

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